Thursday, November 10, 2011

Markets in Everything: $19 Unlimited Phone Plan

YAHOO NEWS -- "When it comes to mobile carriers, consumers may have four major choices, but they're all starting to look the same — and that isn't a good thing. But a new provider, Republic Wireless, headquartered in North Carolina, is shaking things up with a rather unbelievable $19 a month no-contract plan. That's $19 not just for unlimited calling and texting, but mobile data too."

MP: Gotta love the cutthroat competition, often the best form of "regulation" and market discipline, and the consumers' best friend.

i'll bet that at the bottom of this is either a business plan that will go BK in short order or a some kind of sweetheart federal deal that lets them use the infrastructure of others and not pay for it.

if i am allowed to use a lane on your bridge which i did not pay for, of course i can charge a low toll. but that's hardly a replicable business model in and kind of long run.

my bet is that they have a handful of towers and are somehow getting free peering due to political patronage, allowing them to sell the assets of others at zero cost.

All major cable companies are standing behind the $9.95 offer, which will be valid for two years. The price doesn't include taxes, but the companies are pledging to charge nothing for installation or modem rental...

If you look at The Tax Foundation, you will see that rural America is heavily subsidized by urban America.

Speaking of just telephone service, we now shovel $8 billion annually to pay for rural phone service, sometime at the expense of ten of thousands of dollars per line.

The most mollycoddled, knock-kneed, subsidized pinko-economic weaklings in the world are rural Americans.

Usually voting GOP, btw.

Love that ethanol. How about $32 billion for cotton farmers since 1995?

Solyndra made a big mistake(they were rank amateurs). They should have said they were "harvesting" sunlight, and located in rural districts. We would subsidize them annually thereafter.

Ever notice how the GOP talks a ton about cutting programs where the money comes back to you (Social Security) but never agency programs in which your money is sucked into a parasitic dung pit, never to be seen again (USDA, Defense, Interior)?

Just so we're clear on how this works, they're renting long-range cellular towers from Sprint and supplementing that with short-range wifi everywhere they can, which they don't have to pay for. While I think they're on the right track, as a wireless future dominated by wifi is inevitable, it's probably too early to pull this off. But if you don't use much data on the go, already have a home wifi setup that you're happy with, and just want a dirt-cheap plan, this plan does make sense for those people now.